A United Nations report released this week provides statistical evidence to support Kanye West’s claim that the Bush Administration does not care about Black people.
Black infants in Washington, DC, have a higher death rate than their counterparts in the Indian state of Kerala. . . Black mothers [in the US] are twice as likely as white moms to give birth to a low-birthweight baby. And their children are more likely to become ill.
[T]he infant mortality rate has been rising in the US for the past five years - and is now the same as in Malaysia. -- United Nations Report
Bush is scheduled to speak before the U.N. this Wednesday. It should be interesting. The image of the US as Superpower has taken a major hit since the Bush Administration has proved via Katrina that it is impotent when it comes to keeping the American people safe in the homeland.
Or as one newspaper headline put it: Katrina Brings Superpower to its Knees.
AP Diplomatic writer, Anne Gearan observes:
“Rarely in U.N. history has the United States, the organization's chief sponsor and host, looked as awkward or vulnerable to foreign eyes as it does now."
"With 170 world leaders meeting in New York this week, the Bush administration is scrambling to save lives and restore its can-do image. Hurricane Katrina has produced scenes of devastation and deprivation shocking to the rich and powerful U.S. but all too familiar elsewhere.”
Gearan lists some of the many reasons the U.N. - or the world - has to resent the my-way-or-the-highway Bush Administration:
Staggered by Katrina, the U.S. also faces international opposition to the war it is leading in Iraq. There is resentment, too, that Bush has refused to sign the Kyoto treaty on global warming or embrace British Prime Minister Tony Blair's proposal that rich nations donate foreign aid equal to 0.7 percent of their national income. The U.S. percentage is 0.16 percent, the lowest of leading industrialized nations.
And then there’s John Bolton and the well-founded fear that Bush sent him to the U.N. to “sabotage the summit.”
But the U.N. is fighting back. The report released this week provides a scathing condemnation of US policies at home and abroad. While the report normally concerns itself with so-called Third World countries, this year the U.N. scrutinizes the underbelly of the Superpower. Among the shocking findings, the report concludes that "parts of the US are as poor as the Third World." No suprise that most of those "parts" are Black.
The United Nations - favourite whipping boy of US neo-conservatives - has likened poverty levels in parts of America to those in the Third World.
The report is bound to incense the Bush administration, as it provides ammunition for critics who have claimed that the fiasco following Hurricane Katrina shows Washington does not care about poor black Americans. . . The document constitutes a stinging attack on US policies at home and abroad in a fight-back against moves by Washington to undermine next week's 60th anniversary conference of the UN, which will be the biggest gathering of world leaders in history.
Child mortality, it says pointedly, is on the rise in the US: for half a century, the US has witnessed a sustained decline in the number of children who die before their fifth birthday. But since 2000 this trend has been reversed (emphasis added).
Although the US leads the world in healthcare spending - per head of population it spends 13 percent of its national income, twice what other rich nations spend - this high level goes disproportionately on the care of white Americans.
A baby boy born to one of the richest 5 percent of American families will live 25 percent longer than a boy born in the bottom 5 percent.
Black infants in Washington, DC, have a higher death rate than their counterparts in the Indian state of Kerala.
Black mothers are twice as likely as white moms to give birth to a low-birthweight baby. And their children are more likely to become ill. Hispanic Americans are more than twice as likely as white Americans to lack health coverage.
The US is the only one among the world's wealthiest countries to have no universal health insurance system... Just 13 percent of white Americans are uninsured, compared with 21 percent of blacks and 34 percent of Hispanics. Being born into an uninsured household equates to a 50 percent greater chance of dying before the age of one year.
If the gap in healthcare between black and white Americans were eliminated, it would save nearly 85,000 lives a year.
United Nations Health Care Poverty Racism Katrina Bush
